Painted Devils, page 8
I let Emeric in and spot the cause of the delay: a pack slung over his shoulder. “You got your stuff.”
“I did. I…” He trails off, a strange look on his face. “Are you wearing perfume?”
“My old soap.”
“Oh.” He sets his pack down.
I pull a clean linen shift from the plain wooden trunk Udo built for me. “I need to change.”
“R-right. I’ll just, er.” He closes the door, then turns his back to me and faces the corner, rubbing the nape of his neck.
Part of me wants to be charmed by his propriety. Part of me can’t stop hearing “Miss Schmidt.” I say nothing, just go to work on my dress’s ties.
“How much did you overhear?” Emeric asks. “I assume that’s why Meister Ros gave us the room.”
“You wanted me to eavesdrop?”
“I expected no less.”
I step out of my dress and chemise and pull the shift over my head. “So you just said what I’d want to hear.”
“No, I—” There’s a rustle as he starts to turn around and then catches himself. “I want you to know where things stand.”
“Your turn to change.” I climb into bed and scoot to the far side of the mattress, staring at the wooden slats of the wall.
“Vanja, I—have I upset you?”
“It’s nothing,” I lie, for a third time. There’s a horrid silence punctured only by the thmp of buttons slipping through wool and a whisper of fabric I am much, much too aware of. I don’t know if my head is burning with frustration or—well, a different kind of frustration. The words pop out before I can reel them back in: “You’re just doing your duty.”
The sudden quiet tells me Emeric’s gone still. After a moment, he says, “I didn’t lie to Kirkling. My duty as a prefect is not to trick anyone into incriminating you for something you didn’t do. It’s to find the truth and to present evidence that verifies it.”
“And what if I did do it?” I sit up, my eyes nailed to the wall. “Because I did rig miracles, I did pretend to have visions, I—”
“As long as it wasn’t in exchange for goods, money, or services—”
“Then why did you have to ask if it was?” My voice rises with an embarrassing quaver. I know none of this makes sense, I know it’s not about me. “Wh-why are you calling me ‘Miss Schmidt’?”
The mattress shifts. I look up to see Emeric kneeling beside me before my face crumples.
“Vanja—” he starts, horrified, then pulls me to him as I burst into utterly humiliating tears. “Oh no, Vanja, I’m so sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry,” I sniffle into his shoulder. “I’m being ridiculous.”
Chagrin weighs each word. “No, you’re not. I thought it would be easier for you if you knew what I was asking, if—if I tried to make it less personal—but I haven’t called you ‘Miss Schmidt’ since … Hubert. And that was awful for you.” His voice hitches. “I was awful to you. And now you’re watching me dredge up anything you may have done wrong so you can be put on trial … Of course that’s distressing. I’m sorry, I didn’t think this through at all.”
“It’s not your fault,” I mumble. “I’m the one who started a cult.”
“But it’s not my duty to—to terrorize you either,” he insists. “If I can’t do my job otherwise, then I have no business joining the prefects.” He thinks a moment. “Do you still have the amnesty token from Minkja?”
I pull back enough to reach a small bag on the crate that serves as a bedside table. Inside are trinkets I kept from Bóern: a black feather from Ragne, a little leather notebook Emeric gave me for my birthday (which, admittedly, is still completely blank), a luck charm from Winterfast, and, at the very bottom, a pewter coin stamped with the sigil of the prefects.
“Here.” I hold up the coin.
Emeric folds his hand over mine and closes his eyes. There’s a soft pulse of silvery light between our fingers.
When I realize what he’s doing, it’s already too late.
“Done,” he says, letting go. “It’s active again. I’ll have the Dänwik outpost formally document your amnesty as a consultant for the Scarlet Maiden case. No prefect can arrest you as long as the case is open.”
I’m both overwhelmed and strangely upset that he would take this risk for me. “But you’ll have to close it to pass your Finding.”
“Then I won’t close it without compelling evidence that you shouldn’t be charged.”
“But what if I should—”
“I don’t think this is chance,” he says in a rush. “It all feels too—orchestrated. You’ve been here since the end of January, but the Scarlet Maiden first manifests when prefects arrive, just to claim me for a sacrifice? And there just happen to be two of seven brothers right here?”
“You don’t think she’s a real Low God,” I say tautly, leaving the rest to hang between us: And that makes me guilty.
But Emeric shakes his head. “She very well may be real. But just because she’s a god doesn’t mean she’s good. The real question here is what she wants. And in the meantime, you shouldn’t have to live in fear.”
I’m getting choked up again, but for a completely different reason, so I just lay my cheek over his heart and try to breathe. “Saints and martyrs, this is going to be hard, isn’t it.”
“Mm-hm. We’ll figure out what to do differently in the morning.” He presses a kiss to my temple. “But as long as we’re in this…” He trails off again. I don’t mind; I know how it ends.
I can’t help a bewildered laugh when he buries his nose in my still-damp hair. “What are you doing?”
“Sorry,” he says, with no trace of remorse. “Gods, I missed that smell.”
CHAPTER SIX
CONSULTATION
I expect to wake the next morning much as I did the morning before: pleasantly tangled with Emeric, but letting it last this time. Instead, I awake to a clear view of the wall, an unintentional success of the separate-blankets gambit, and a slight chill.
When I roll over, Emeric is staring at me with an expression best summarized as haunted. Bizarrely, he seems to have slept under his coat, a towel, and several unbuttoned shirts.
“You,” he says blearily, “are an unparalleled devil from hell in your sleep.”
“What?”
Emeric rubs his eyes. “You stole all the blankets. And then you rolled up in them, like a, a crêpe, so they were stuck on your side. And then, when I tried to take one off the top, you turned over, looked me straight in the eye, and said—and I quote—‘I’ll kill you.’”
“I never.”
“You followed it up with ‘It’ll look like an accident.’”
That unfortunately tracks. Mortified, I wordlessly free one side of the blankets and extend it to him. He sheds the laundry and scoots under with a grumble that subsides when I wrap my arms around his chest. He is rather dreadfully chilly. I mumble into his nightshirt, “Well, at least you know I can’t come up with a decent murder threat in my sleep.”
“Quite the contrary,” he says, almost a touch impressed. “I asked several follow-ups. Your plan was shockingly robust.”
“Nooo,” I groan.
“One of your contingencies involved a pig farm.”
“I’m never going to hear the end of this, am I?”
“Not if I can help it.” Emeric’s voice rumbles through me, huddled together as we are. There’s something lovely about this, drowsy and warm and feeling the thin linen shift against my skin with his every breath.
We were both exhausted last night, and barely anything happened before we fell asleep. This morning feels different. That sleepy bone-deep hunger is stirring.
I lever myself up until our faces are even and find the same hazy hunger in him. “Then I’ll just have to keep distracting you.”
The kiss starts sweet and velvet soft, lingering like the gloaming, fingers sifting through hair and roaming only within charted territory. But perhaps we’re both thinking of more, or maybe the wild ride of yesterday made us bolder, greedier. It doesn’t take long for me to draw his hands under my nightshirt and let them run deliciously over the bare skin north of my hips. He traces his circles higher and higher, first to ask, then to draw shivers from me, intent like each one is a secret between just us, like he won’t rest until he’s uncovered them all. Nor am I content to let him be alone in his scrutiny, ridding him of his shirt entirely, the better to reorient myself in the maps of rib and scar, muscle and skin, the lines of the prefect contract mark over his heart. In the mellow early morning glow, it’s almost possible to pretend the red handprint isn’t there.
It also doesn’t take long to have an effect on him that linen does little to hide. I think we both realize this at the same time, when I move a knee and brush something that makes him jolt back with a gasp.
He bolts upright. “Oh gods—excuse me—I’ll go to the privy—”
I catch his elbow before he swings his legs over the edge of the bed.
Ordinarily this sort of thing would scramble my brain like an egg, if not send me into an outright panic. It’s all fine to think about, but in person? With anyone else, I’d be sprinting for the hills.
But with him, it’s always a dance between us, always even ground, even when he has to give something up to level it. That makes it less excruciating to want this. It makes it less terrifying to be wanted.
“Wait,” I rasp. “You … don’t have to go.”
Emeric looks back at me, a flush staining his cheeks, dark hair in glorious disarray, eyes locked on mine from behind crooked spectacles. “Vanja, please, tell me exactly what you mean.”
Maybe it’s the rush of testing new waters with him; maybe the way I feel is like a fire that’s spread from a single ember, growing beyond what it once was. It’s easy to feel, more awkward to say. “I want to … to touch you. What do you want?”
He reaches over, traces a small circle between my hip and my belly button. His words stumble out like unsteady foals. “That, but … for you first. Is that all right?”
I can’t suppress a shiver, and it gets a nervous laugh out of us both. There’s a riotous weightlessness in my stomach, and the breathless “Yes” that escapes my lips is not a lie.
“I don’t really know what I’m doing,” he admits, shifting to a better angle. “Do you, er, know what you like?”
There is a very specific reason that I do. I half garble something under my breath.
“What?”
I feel a whole-body flush coming on. “Three months” is all I say.
A bastardly smug grin breaks across his face. But it softens as he reaches for one of my hands. “Will you show me?”
I swallow. If it’s all like this, maybe—maybe we can manage. This is nerve-racking and wonderful; I have never felt so exposed and yet so safe. I can do this. We can do this.
I weave my fingers through his and guide the way.
* * *
“Has Helga come by yet?”
I’m aware my voice is high-pitched, nigh strangled; I don’t care. Jakob is setting out breakfast, but he pauses to gesture to his workroom. “She’s helping herself to my supplies.”
“You owe me for this absurd little road trip,” Helga snipes from beyond the doorway.
“Thanks!” I chirp through a rictus grin, and march stiffly over to the workroom.
Helga is squinting at an open jar of dried leaves. She shoves it at me. “Here, smell. Do you think they’re still good?”
I push the jar out of my face and close the door. “I have a question now,” I squeak.
“Don’t we all. Why, just yesterday I was wondering what could possibly compel me to seek out my terrible brothers again, and—”
“Helga,” I hiss frantically, “I think I’m pregnant.”
“Oh.” Helga retracts the jar, eyebrows raised. “Then Jakob owes me ten sjilling.”
“You,” I squawk, outraged, “you bet on—”
Helga cuts me off. “Wait. Does the prefect boy still have the handprint mark?” I nod. Her mouth twists. “Then I’m pretty sure you’re not pregnant. Unless one of you was very determined. And a contortionist. Damn, I could have used the money in Dänwik. They make this witch-ash out of—”
I interrupt her this time, squeaking a little. “How can you be sure?”
Helga sets the jar down, eyeing me. It might be the first time she’s done so without a shadow of suspicion. She clears a few bundles of wool off Jakob’s worktable, then pats the wood indicatively before circling to sit on the far side. “Sorry. Sit. Let’s do this properly. Why do you think you might be pregnant?”
I sit across from her, heat rushing to my face. “We … er … were … more than kissing, and…”
Helga holds up a hand. “You need to be specific for me to help you.”
I thought it was hard to tell Emeric what I wanted, but this is infinitely worse. I look anywhere but at Helga. “I was touching his … him.”
She waits.
“You know what I mean!”
“Say it,” she says sternly.
I try not to squirm in place. “You’re just doing this to embarrass me!”
“I’m doing this,” Helga returns, “because if you aren’t ready to say it, then you really aren’t ready to be touching it, and that’s a very different conversation.”
I bury my face in my hands. A moment later, the vague phantom of a word escapes between my fingers, briefly taking the form of “penis” before evanescing into the ether.
“Sorry,” Helga says innocently, “what was that?”
My temper snaps. I slam both hands on the table and bellow, “PENIS. ALL RIGHT? PENIS.”
Jakob’s kitchen sounds cease momentarily, then resume from behind the closed workshop door with the kind of premeditated clanking that says, We will never speak of this.
“Maybe a little to embarrass you,” Helga allows. “Anyway. You were using only your hands?” I nod miserably. “That won’t get you pregnant.”
“But when he—” I halt, more flustered than ever. I can think of a dozen crude ways to say this, but I don’t want to talk about it like it’s a bawdy bar song. I don’t want to talk about it at all.
Helga clears her throat. “Was there,” she says tactfully, “an emission?”
I duck my head. “And—some got on me. So…”
“Did you wash off?”
“Of course,” I grumble before my head flies up. “Will that keep me from getting pregnant?”
“No.” Helga wrinkles her nose. “Again, you’re not pregnant, this is about hygiene. We’re surrounded with fabric in here, and nobody wants that on their new clothes. The point is, most people get pregnant only when that emission happens”—she gestures vaguely at her hips—“inside them, where it can reach the womb, during certain times in their monthly cycle. There are other ways to get with child, but that kind of intercourse is the only way it happens accidentally.”
“Right,” I say, feeling very foolish. “Good.”
Helga reads me correctly and waves her hand. “Don’t feel bad for not knowing. Plenty of parents just decide their teenagers don’t need to know anything about sex—”
“Don’t say it so loud?” I whine, my shoulders bunching instinctively.
She rolls her eyes. “—until they’re wed, and that’s how you get Johann the Younger, father of five before he was seventeen.” At my horrified look, she clarifies, “Five different mothers. He was quite … industrious. Anyway, you can get warts, boils, and infections from other … activities, even if your partner hasn’t bedded anyone else. So let’s talk about protection.”
“I would rather get breakfast,” I grumble, pushing back from the table.
“Fine.” Helga’s voice turns stern, almost reproachful. She also leans back, crossing her arms. “Then we can revisit this conversation two days from now, when it burns every time you use a privy.”
I scowl at her. “I didn’t ask for your help.”
Helga matches my scowl. “You very much did, and you very clearly still need it. Look, I’m not going to tell you how to feel about sex or that you should even feel comfortable talking about it with me. I will tell you that it demands communication, especially about your health and safety. And that we’re not going to have another chance to speak privately about this until Dänwik, at the earliest, so. Your choice.”
Ugh. The only thing that could make this worse is admitting Helga’s right, so I just slouch a little deeper on the stool. “Fine. You’re the midwife. What do you recommend?”
“You have a lot of options, from daily tinctures to single-use charms, but those are, hmm, fussy.” Helga tilts her head as she tucks a stray wisp of auburn hair back into her braided crown. “The simplest method is what we call the root-bind. It’s an enchantment anchored to an internal bone of your choice—we typically use your pelvis or lowest vertebra—and it lasts for a year unless you have the enchantment undone early. While it’s active, a root-bind prevents things from, well, taking root. You won’t conceive or catch any diseases. You’ll still have monthly cycles, but they may be lighter and their timing might change. The main drawback is that once the root-bind’s set, if you want it undone before the year’s up, you need a trained hedgewitch.”
“That’s the only downside?” I ask, nervous. “No other side effects?”
“It’s also usually the most expensive option,” Helga drawls. “A root-bind needs high-grade witch-ash. But it’ll be free for you because I’m stealing Jakob’s witch-ash, because he owes me for making me deal with teenagers. If you want, we can do it here and be done before breakfast.”
I swallow. It’s a strange feeling, actually thinking about whether or not I even want to conceive. I was the youngest of thirteen children, a completely unfathomable number. Part of me feels aghast at the idea, and part of me …
Well. It’s easy to want that family when they’re pure imagination, an unconditional fantasy, whatever I want them to be.
